Cover Story- Interviews (5-9)

Adi Godrej - Chairman, Godrej Group

I see the role of technology increasing considerably across businesses in the future as it enables efficiency and increased productivity.

The Godrej group is committed to improve its business operations through the continued improvement in its use of technology across its businesses.

We see an absolute increase in expenditure on technology but not necessarily as a percentage of revenue as we expect rapid growth in revenue too.

We certainly expect technological innovations to help in ease of business, providing services to customers and leading to improved customer satisfaction.

I feel industries in India are adapting fast to adopt new technologies to improve business performance.

Sandeep Bakhshi - Managing Director & CEO, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance

While technology has always played a significant role in industry’s back-end processes, over the last few years, the life insurance industry has taken measures to adopt technology at the customer- facing end. Technological developments have given a boost to distribution and facilitated on-boarding of customers. For a country like ours with its population and geographical spread, technology helps as the means to bridge the geographical divide efficiently. Life insurance is also about customer service. The availability of the digital platform for managing policies offers convenience to customers. The dematerialisation of life insurance policies makes it easy for customers to manage multiple policies via a single account. It also makes for safe and damage free policy storage.

For over three years now, we have been encouraging the use of the digital platform for purchase and sale of policies. Our distributors are equipped with an application that is device agnostic. The sales process, right from need analysis, recommending appropriate products as per the customers’ life stage requirements, collecting documents, etc. are all carried out via our in-house-developed app, iNEO+. For customers it is a rich experience, enabling them to make an informed decision. Moreover, form-filling, e-KYC, real-time decision on the policy and online payment facilities, make the process of purchasing life insurance, virtually paperless. What took days to get done earlier, is now done in a matter of minutes. This has enhanced our distributor efficiencies on one hand and has also provided an efficient mechanism of scaling up distribution for the Company without relying on physical infrastructure.

We have seen a healthy adoption and affinity by our sales system. 92.3% of new business was initiated through digital platform for FY2016. New business premium (Retail weighted received premium) per employee has improved from Rs. 2.8 million per employee in FY2014 to Rs.4.6 million in FY2016. Each distributor is now also a service point, as he/she can help customers service their policies via the digital platform. Enhanced convenience has resulted in higher acceptance at the customers’ end as well. More than 50% of our renewal premiums were collected electronically in FY2016. 

Technology is the key for keeping pace with the changing trends in business and the changing habits of customers. The customers today are different from customers 10 years ago and the habits will keep changing with time. We believe that it would be imperative for the industry to stay invested in technology. It needs to provide mechanisms to simplify and innovate, for products that are easily understood can be easily purchased. Digitisation of the economy would fasten the process of more customers interacting electronically for various products and services. A simpler, technology-aided platform would ensure that insurance companies continue to stay relevant with the new age customer. What’s more the ultimate moment of truth – claims settlement, is also made into a hassle free process thanks to the availability of online claim intimation.

Subrat Mohanty - Senior Executive Vice President & Head-Strategy, Ops, Bs & T & Health, HDFC Life.

Technology is helping insurance industry grow broadly on two fronts. One is “reach”, where it is allowing products to be available to everyone through online presence. Second is “new customer segments”, that were untapped till the recent past. In a country as large as India, reaching the customers becomes critical. Better reach is possible due to internet and its widespread usage. Technology is also changing some of the core functions in insurance that were untouched till now. We have moved from an era of front-end technology adoption to technology adoption across the value chain. Savings from decrease in the processing and maintenance costs can now be invested at the front-end to help increase the market through new products, targeted marketing and so on.

Our vision is to be the leader in effective use of technology to meet the needs of customers, employees and partners. We follow a “two speed” IT execution strategy, where for programs such as online and mobility, we enable rapid development cycles. While our front-end is being transformed with initiatives such as mobility, our backend is being bolstered with capabilities such as robotic process automation and artificial intelligence. This increases efficiency multifold and reduces cost of operations. Mobility has seen more than 90% adaption which has decreased sales related costs and is helping improve sales productivity. With digital we also intend to integrate with non-traditional partners and create new distribution avenues.

These days information is abundant and customers don’t necessarily need to rely on information dissemination by the company alone. It becomes important for us to keep engaging with customers online or offline and directly or indirectly. Conversations with customers today can be personalised and real-time. Traditional marketing medium is complementing the new media. We are tracking our public messages faster to create effective campaigns. To showcase our achievement, we are ranked among the top 10 in entire BFSI segment in most of the social media sites.

Sarv Saravanan - Senior Vice President and General Manager, Dell EMC

There is a strong push on tech adoption in the country, driven by both the private and public sectors. Government initiatives like Smart Cities, Digital India have set the base for widespread tech adoption across sectors. Policy frameworks are also being revised to support and nurture innovations eg – Draft Software Policy 2016. At the same time, the biggest push for tech adoption is coming from end customers who expect service on demand. The eco system is falling into place with government policy change and push, corporate interest and out of the box innovation by Startups. Thanks to Startups like NowFloats, SMEs also have digital platform to grow their businesses.

Yes, definitely, customers today have higher expectations and demand service and products that deliver the best results. This is not possible without significant investment in technology. I would like to quote a survey that Dell Technologies undertook in association with Vanson Bourne. 4,000 business leaders across 16 countries and 12 industries were polled, to assess their readiness for digital transformation. This Digital Transformation Index throws light on some of the biggest technology trends that organizations are undergoing today. It was found that, 73% of the 4000 business leaders surveyed are in agreement that a centralized technology strategy needs to be a priority for their business and 66% are planning to invest in IT infrastructure and digital skills leadership. So it comes as no surprise that almost three in four i.e. 72% of respondents are now expanding their software development capabilities in order to advance their digital business transformation.

2017 ushers in a new phase for all of us at Dell Technologies. We begin a new year as a combined company with unparalleled prospects of collaboration, innovation and immense value creation. The technology powerhouse that we are today has only one direction to go and that is to grow. The R&D and Service Delivery Centers in India will continue to provide enormous value to Dell Technologies on behalf of our stakeholders, allowing us to leverage the amazing talent and unique IT ecosystem in India, extend support to local sales efforts, and contribute to Dell Technologies’ innovation.

Dinanath Dubhashi - MD, L&T Financial Holdings

"Machines can do work better, errorfree and more efficiently than people"

​L&T Finance Holdings will start giving thrust to technology investments for digitisation of processes and analytics. Can you take me through the company’s plans on this front?

There is major thrust for technology. Any process which is mechanical internally can be done by machines and I think it should be done by machines only because machines can only do it better than humans without any errors. It also saves cost as machines require low cost and have better efficiency than people. That does not mean we require less people, as they can be redeployed to other works such as business, collections, thinking, strategies, planning. But everyday job like data entry, call centres, underwriting can be done by machines. So, that is our thrust over digital and analytics.

It is difficult to say now. We are investing Rs 50 crore in the technology from FY18 itself. Technology itself is going to change entire things in future. It will make easier to customer approaches and we can take faster decision to reduce turnaround time. So, people will get loans faster, it will save the cost passed on to the profits and get cheaper loans.

Going forward couple of years, most operations that is data entry, cheques checking, call centres will all be done by robots. You have to worry about job generation, but the sector will do well.

As far as possible there will not be any layoffs. Rather people will be redeployed over business and collections. Rather than sitting idle, they can go to the field and get business for the company that machines can’t do.

Any repetitive job will have a replacement and until we create jobs in other fields, we will have no worry

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